26_1-8

8
No.26 APRIL 24, 2018
TIMEO U T
WWW.DAY.KIEV.UA
City of the Sun and darkness,
By Hanna PAROVATKINA
Photos by Mykola TYMCHENKO, The Day
The exhibit is named “Private City.” While
art critics keep locking horns over what
the “Kyiv art school” is, artists are
painting Kyiv, their most favorite city.
Viktor Khomenko’s “Private City” creates
a strong impression. His Kyiv is, to a large
extent, expressionism (and, obviously, the cycle
has no formal signs of “nude art” or “erotica”).
Those who viewed the pictures for the first time
saw Kyiv as a “corporeal,” 3D, and living city. It
is a genuine Kyiv, the one we love and know
down to the minutest detail.
IMPRESSIONS
By Pavlo PALAMARCHUK, Lviv
or Kyiv as a battlefield of “Gnostic” cosmogony
at Viktor Khomenko’s exhibit in Triptych Art Gallery
Garbage... of the future
Photo by the author
A Lviv ceramic artist has
created a conceptual
project of plastic fossils
Viktor KHOMENKO is well known in the art
milieu. It will be recalled that as far back as 1976
he was a co-organizer of the first unofficial exhibit
of nonconformist artists in our capital. He
began exhibit officially in the late 1980s. It is he
who published for many years on sheer enthusiasm
(and continues to do so today, if possible)
the influential journal Obrazotvorche Mystetstvo
(“Fine Arts”). Unfortunately, Khomenko’s
popularity among the broad masses of contemporary
art appreciators is almost inversely proportional
to his fame among his colleagues. This
master of Ukrainian avant-garde is clearly underestimated
– in contrast, by the way, to his famous
daughters, artist Lesia and designer Yasia
(although it is impossible not to notice the impact
of father’s work on the Khomenkos’
younger generation).
“Private City” is Viktor Khomenko’s new
painting cycle, unexpected from many angles to
the connoisseurs of his usually ironic oeuvre.
“I’ve been searching for the ‘new’ in art for
all my lifetime,” the artist says. “And now, unexpectedly
even for myself, I’d like to ‘cast an
anchor.’ I need graphicness. Landscape is the
most demanded genre of Ukrainian painting.
But the commercial side of the matter did not interest
me. The point is I do not often leave the
city and spend most of the time at the wheel of
my car. Whenever I drive, I watch urban landscapes.
Yet the ‘Private City’ cycle is not about
the city or landscapes. It is a story of me – a personal
one, like a diary.”
The city, a model of the Universe, a heavenly
Kyiv, livened up under Khomenko’s paintbrush
and emerges in a combination of “sunny”
hues. No wonder, the word “sunset” runs
through the names of some of the cycle’s pictures
– “Sunset Street” – “Vulytsia Symona
Petliury,” “Sunset Minibus,” “Sunset Avenue”
– “Brest-Lytovskyi Prospekt). And this
incredible picture in a mixture of hot-yelloworange,
blue and black colors, is titled “Sunlight”
and, in Ukrainian, “Svitlo Sontsia Bohdana
Khmelnytskoho.” In most of the pictures,
the hot-yellow background and sunrays contrast
with gray and black manmade objects. It is the
easily recognizable bridges and overpasses (e.g.,
“The Bridge” – “Moskovskyi Mist”). A string of
cars, gray winter snow (“Winter Time” – “Zymovyi
Chas”), the pedestrian bridge, and
Dnieper hills under the bleak winter sky (“Privale
City” – “Pryvatne Misto”).
Step by step, a grandiose picture unfolds before
your eyes: Kyiv as a battlefield of true
“Gnostic” cosmogony, where the forces of the
Sun rival with the darkness of evil. Or, maybe,
the eternal sleep of Brahma? Quite to the point,
one of the largest canvases of the cycle, “The Hill
over the River” – “Naberezhno-Khreshchatytska
St.,” seems to show some inscriptions in Sanskrit.
Incidentally, the “dual” names of each picture
can also testify to the “binarity” of Kyiv,
the city of Andrew the Apostle and of the Black
Serpent.
“In painting, everybody tends to see his
own,” Khomenko notes. “And what pleases me is
that, perhaps for the first time in my lifetime,
none of the exhibit visitors asked me: ‘What do
your pictures mean?’ There is no invisible wall
that usually rises between the spectator and the
artist with his works! It is an incredible feeling,
when pictures are self-sufficient.”
■ The exhibit “Private City” will remain
open till April 25.
The Zelena Kanapa Gallery is hosting an
exhibition of the famous ceramic artist Olha
Pylnyk, entitled “Fossils 4018.” The number
in the title of the exhibition is a notional year,
into which the artist tries to transport
visitors of the exhibition with her works, and the
gallery serves in this case as a museum of
archaeology of the future.
“Once, while going on a walk, I began to look at
the roadsides not yet covered with grass. They were
littered with pressed plastic bottles that looked like
they were lying there for centuries. Then I wondered,
‘how will we look in the next civilizations’
imaginations? And what will we leave for their future
archaeological excavations?’ Foreseeing that
correctly is probably very difficult, and this is not
my task. Let the futurologists think about it. I only
have a great hope that subsequent civilizations
will be even more sapiens,” Pylnyk said.
And so the project “Fossils 4018” came to be.
The ceramic artist and her son began to travel to the
suburbs of Lviv to collect plastic waste there.
However, before disposing of it, she impressed it on
her ceramics. In that way, strange fossils of the future
appeared on her works which are made of
chamotte, or fired clay.
“Such bottles cover our whole planet. They are
everywhere: in cities and villages, on land and in
water bodies, in woods and fields, in the mountains
and plains, on all continents. In my imagination,
I already saw how the archaeologists of subsequent
civilizations would find the whole piles of
compressed bottles that had already fossilized or
left impressions on the stone. I wanted to show this
in my works and express this incredibly striking
contrast between the natural beauty of the land
and the sad anti-aesthetics of man-made garbage
of our time,” said the artist.
In total, 11 works ranging from 30 to 70 centimeters
in length are presented at the exhibition.
All of them are also covered with angobs
and enamels.
According to the gallery’s owner Olesia Domaradzka,
this project is a good example of contemporary
art, and is full of profound meanings
as well. After all, it raises the issue of plastic bottles
and plastic waste in general, which harms
our planet.
■ “Fossils 4018” can be visited until May 6.
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